14 month old had 10 surgeries

[Firsttimemum0558]

My son is coming up 14 months old. Today he had his 10th surgery since January and there were a couple of complications during this one. He usually has a breathing mask during surgeries and has done fine but today he needed intubation and a lot of suction to remove “gunk” from his airway, so his surgery took double the amount of time it should’ve.
im waiting for a meeting with our consultant and an anaesthetist but has anyone been in a similar position and what have you decided to do? Continue surgeries or put them on pause until little one is bigger and their body can handle it better?
The surgeries are to try to correct a birth injury (nasal stenosis) so if we stop then it’s a very obvious “deformity” in the middle of his face and it does cause breathing issues. I’m obviously worried about bullying and self esteem issues as he gets older, but I’m concerned that we could’ve lost him today.

I haven’t been in that situation and it sounds incredibly hard OP.
For me id be asking - what is the likely gain is with each subsequent surgery, how many more does your baby need?, What happened today to make things more difficult for your LO to need intubation? what is the risk of similar events happening again (ie does the risk increase with each operation)?
This is going to be one of those situations where you have to balance risk and benefit and only you and your family know what is right for you.

I've got no advice but sending you and your son lots of love. He's been through so much already by the sounds of it. Hopefully someone will come along soon who has been in the same boat and can share some words of wisdom

Sounds like just one of those things. It’d be a bit unusual to be doing nasal surgery without intubating though - are you sure you’ve heard the full story? It’s not terribly uncommon to need to suction gunk from kids (they can be pretty snotty normally, but even more so if they’ve been quietly brewing a bug) - if they still did the operation it probably means it wasn’t a big problem. Hope they can give you a better idea of what went on when you seen the anaesthetist. (Doi: anaesthetist)

Awww it’s awful when they’re longer than expected in surgery. My youngest had a laryngospasm coming round from a tonsillectomy and ended up being put under again and woken up again, which meant it was about an hour longer than expected. I did find that they were a bit cagey about telling me exactly what happened so I read his notes (and photographed them to discuss with a medic friend).

I don’t think I can advise on what to do about future operations but I think I’d be asking questions about how common the incident today is, whether it’s likely to happen again, and whether it’s to do with the number of ops he has had. Ultimately they won’t be wanting to operate on a baby who is too fragile so see what they have to say.